Sunset Soon Forgotten
by XpapermoonX
Summary: "She Runs Returning, Sun Still Sinking"-Iron&Wine. Abby's strength is tested daily, and with that, Gibbs is tested also. Abby/Gibbs pairing established .


**Author's Note:** **Right now I'm only writing one-shots (long and short) because of my hectic schedule. I just HATE leaving stories unfinished. Therefore, this has been something I have been working on for quite a while! It might not be much and my action writing is not what you guys might be used to, but it's how I prefer to stylize. I'm a detail kinda gal! **

**I hope you guys like it! If there are any qualms about grammar, continuity, characterization, or anything like that, PLEASE let me know! **

**I disclaim any ownership that might be misinterpreted via my works. Please retract any lawsuits or subpoenas that may have been assembled. **

**Please read and review. Thanks for reading!**

Leroy Jethro Gibbs was not a happy man. In fact, if there was a level above pure, unadulterated rage, he was feeling it as he stormed through the automatic doors of the Bethesda Emergency Room.

"Abigail Sciuto." He growled to the first nurse he made eye contact with. The woman hadn't hesitated for more than a couple of seconds before he shouted the name again.

He was taken to the Intensive Care waiting area where his three agents sat in fear—partially for their friend, and partially for the wrath they were surely going to receive from their boss. But he didn't say a word. The former marine just walked in, and sat on the opposite side of the room—without a word, without making eye contact.

DiNozzo looked to McGee and Ziva. The two seemed to gulp simultaneously. Head slaps they could take. Glares and shouting was fine. But this was downright chilling. The man before them wasn't the Agent Gibbs they were used to. Right then, he looked like any other man—one with fears. Fears that he didn't even pretend to try and hide.

_**Two Hours Earlier**_

It was a slow week at NCIS. Gibbs had promised his father that he would visit Stillwater before storm season started and help patch up the store's roof. He was going to take Abby with him, but Vance had volunteered her services to the FBI for the week. As angry as he was that his girl was being passed around like an object, they both knew that if he'd made a huge fuss then it would alert the director to their relationship.

DiNozzo, McGee, and Ziva offered to help with the case as well. Mostly to keep Abby company, but also because it was far too interesting to pass up. In the end, Fornell just surrendered it to NCIS—for once he had too much on his plate to care about the lines of jurisdiction.

The case had started with a couple of kids finding a human finger buried in he middle of the woods. Soon more body parts began to show up. Not all from the same person, but they had been dismembered the same way—with a rusted saw of some sort—jagged and sloppy. There had been no fingerprints and no DNA matches to anything. It was as though every victim had appeared out of thin air.

Abby was getting frustrated. One of her biggest pet peeves was inconclusive evidence. Her love was forensics. And like most loves, when it disappointed her, it was devastating.

"We have to go to the warehouse where the torso was found." She told her 'Three Musketeers'. "The photographs from the scene show some sort of black substance around the edges of the ribcage, but the FBI coroner didn't report seeing anything there when he did the autopsy, nor did Ducky."

"Can't we go in the morning Abby?" Tony muttered from the futon he had laid out on the floor of her lab. "I haven't slept in three days. Seventy-two hours!"

"We know how many hours are in a day Tony!" Ziva snapped from underneath her arms as she rested her head on Abby's desk.

DiNozzo ignored her, just as Abby ignored both of them. She typed furiously at her computer, hoping to find something she had missed.

McGee didn't even try to find a comfortable place to rest—the floor beneath the Mass Spectrometer suited him fine.

It was nearly three AM when she caught her break. After hours of zooming, sharpening, and focusing on every single crime scene photograph, she saw a hair—caught in the springs of the couch that the torso had been on.

After surveying the room, she knew that her three warriors were in no condition to go collect the possibly groundbreaking piece of evidence. She knew that Ducky and Palmer were both exhausted as well, so calling them was out of the question.

"It's just collecting the specimen and leaving." She told herself as she walked briskly through the parking lot to her Dragster. "It shouldn't be a huge deal."

/

But it was a huge deal.

Arnold Krawiec was the only child in an abusive household. His family ha snuck into the country when he was a toddler. After years of torture at the hands of his Polish father and mother, he snapped. After he brutally killed his parents—at the age of fifteen—he moved on to other illegal immigrants.

It wasn't until three years later, when he ran out of places to hide the body parts. Things were being found. He went from being terrified to being sadistic. He enjoyed the attention the press was paying to his work.

He began to target everyone he came across. Garbage men, teenagers in the park, even a woman walking with her infant daughter. He'd spared the child, but he put her mother's right foot in the basket under the stroller.

He was sleeping inside of a refrigerator box inside of the warehouse he had claimed as his own, when he heard her come in. She was unlike any of the other women he had seen in America. He was fascinated. He wanted to touch the long legs that sprouted from beneath her short skirt. His fingers itched to run through her pigtails.

He had never wanted to make love to a woman before ending her life. But in this case he was going to make an exception.

_**Present**_

'Thank God she had her phone on' was Tony's mantra from the moment they got to the scene.

'Thank goodness we woke up in time to realize something was off' was Tim's.

'Praise Allah I taught her enough self-defense to keep her from having her throat slashed' was Ziva's. And be that as it may, the forensic scientist's training had only just saved her life. Had her teammates been just a couple minutes later, she too would surely have ended up in pieces all over the state.

And though she was still living, she did not get out of there without injuries. Apart from the deeper than deep gashes on her arms, legs, face, and torso, she also sustained a broken wrist, a sprain ankle, and a dislocated kneecap. In the struggle, Krawiec had slammed her head back onto the concrete floor repeatedly. And once he was sure she was unconscious, he raped her, repeatedly.

Gibbs had only been on the road back to DC for twenty minutes when he got the call from DiNozzo telling him what had happened. His senior agent had been unnerved by how anguished his boss had sounded before he'd hung up on him. It was unlike anything he'd heard before.

And now the silver haired man looked even older as he leaned his head against the wall and watched the television in the corner, even though it wasn't turned on.

The doctor had come in every five to ten minutes to update them on Abby's condition. She had to go into emergency surgery once they saw that her lung had been collapsed when Krawiec crushed her ribcage with his knees. Everything else had been stitched, casted, and set—but now it was a matter of her waking up and breathing on her own.

Once visitors were permitted, Gibbs stormed past his team and into the private room of his girl. He closed the door behind him—a signal for them to keep out.

He sat down by her bed and took her wired and tube covered hand in his own. She had bandages covering almost every bit of her. Her beautiful eyes her bruised and swollen—even if she were to open them, he wouldn't have noticed. The mask over her mouth and nose seemed like it would only cause more discomfort to the bruises on her cheeks. But he wasn't going to complain if it was keeping her alive.

Alive.

She was alive and it was no thanks to him. But he knew his Abby would be livid if she knew he was playing the guilt game. It wasn't his fault she was attacked. He wasn't the one who tried to kill her.

But he had failed at protecting her, like he had failed so many others in the past. And that was something he was going to have to live with.

/

"No more field work." He scolded her with a small smile. Forty-eight hours after waking up from her surgery, she was able to breath without the mask, and converse with him. "You're lucky if I even let you out of the lab without an armed escort.

Abby rolled her eyes and continued to examine her medical chart carefully. "Did they use Diphenhydramine before giving me Codine? I tend to break out in hives."

"I told them you have an allergy." Ducky assured her as he looked through her x-rays. "Whether they listened or not is anyone's guess. They don't seem to take the advice of a lowly coroner to heart here." He sneered. Gibbs had to chuckle at his old friend's catty disposition. After two days of dealing with the snooty doctors at Bethesda, he was a bit short fused himself.

A knock drew the trio's attention to the door. DiNozzo stood with a giant stuffed animal—that looked to be a mix between a bear and a cat—and a matching bouquet of roses. "Hello beautiful." He greeted with a cheesy smile. He stopped short when he saw the glare forming on his boss's face. "And hello to you too Abby." He tried to tease with a wink.

If it weren't for Abby's small giggle, he was sure Gibbs would have throttled him then and there.

After Abby had first woken up from her surgery, Gibbs took the time to go out and give the agents the lashing they'd expected and knew they deserved. But when he was done, he thanked them vehemently for saving Abby's life.

"_I don't care whose fault it was." He had told them, his weary eyes brimming with tears. "I'm just grateful that you were able to save her."_

Abby cuddled the stuffed animal as soon as DiNozzo placed it in her arms. "Thanks Tony!" She rasped. She had been talking too much and her weak lungs were punishing her for it.

"Don't mention it." The agent kissed the top of her head as he sat on the edge of the bed next to her. "How are you feeling?"

"Like I was run over with a steamroller." She muttered, playing with the edge of the cast on her wrist. "Is Ziva coming?"

"She had to go to IAB to give her report." Tony was hesitant to bring up anything related to the case, but Abby was a human lie detector, and her slaps were almost worse than Gibbs's.

"She was the one who…" Her friend nodded before she could finish the sentence. "He's dead?"

"Dead." Gibbs piped in from the corner. "He's gone. Forever."

The room was silent for a moment. Ducky cleared his throat and stood up. "Anthony, I hate to make you leave after just getting here, but I do believe Abigail is in need of some shut eye."

Tony didn't argue. Standing up, he gave Abby one last kiss on the cheek before following the doctor out of the room. "See you tomorrow kiddo!" He called behind him as he shut the door.

Gibbs waited a moment before climbing into bed with his girl. Abby snuggled into his arms and rested her head on his chest. "Does your leg still hurt baby?" He murmured into her hair. Her shrug did nothing to appease him as he pressed kiss after kiss on top of her head.

/

Her recovery was long and arduous. She had to go through physical therapy with a retired Marine who had to be twice the size of Gibbs. But he was an old friend of her silver-haired fox, so she'd have been discourteous had she refused treatment.

Gibbs was more than elated to take her home. He even went out and bought her a custom made electric wheelchair—having friends in the medical field went a long way. From the black and red paint, to the fringe on the handlebars and the bat decals, there was no doubt that it belonged to Abby. And if there was, her name monogrammed on the back took care of it.

She wasn't allowed outside for a couple of weeks—her healing lungs made her susceptible to pneumonia and bronchitis. She was happy for the first few days of cuddling, but around day four, she began to grow restless.

Gibbs felt like he had a teenager living with him, rather than his Abby. Night after night, she'd beg and plead to go out, and when he'd say no she would throw the mother of all tantrums (one of her pain medication's side effects are mood swings).

Her nightmares were the worse part. She'd wake up in such a frenzy, that he'd have to hold her down so that she wouldn't pull any stitches. He hated what she had been through—loathed it in fact—and he thought on many occasions about how wonderful it would have been to snap Krawiec's neck himself. But the fact that Ziva had shot him in the arm, leg, stomach, and genitals before making the fatal shot to the head was quite comforting to him.

But therapy—mental and physical—was doing more wonders than she would have cared to admit. She was recovering slowly but surly. Each day, Gibbs removed a different set of stitches, revealing a nicely healing scar. She couldn't use her wrist very much, but luckily for the right-handed forensic scientist, it was her left one. All in all, she was happy, content, and breathing and that was all that matter to Jethro Gibbs.

/

And finally, two months and six days after her attack, Abby was going back to work.

She wasn't necessarily on her feet yet—she had two more knee surgeries before she was ready for walking—but her confidence and usual Abby charisma was more than enough to make up for it.

Gibbs smiled as she wheeled from one agent's desk to another, hearing multiple accounts of all of the cases they had gone through in her absence.

Everyone had missed her energy, even the agents neighboring the team in the bullpen. Her lab had been full of balloons, dark-hued flowers, and stuffed animals of all shapes and sizes when they arrived that morning. She was ecstatic to see her fridge full of Caf-Pows! and her equipment freshly shined.

But she couldn't stay still in her lab with no work to do. She stayed with her four favorite people as they finished up paperwork and bantered in their usual fashion.

When 1800 finally rolled around, Gibbs began to bundle his girl up to take her home.

"Hey Gibbs." She sighed contently as they made their way out of the bullpen.

"Hmm?" He murmured leaning down to kiss the top of her head affectionately as he wheeled her into the elevator.

"Next time you go to Stillwater, you sure as hell better take me."

He laughed as the doors slid closed.


End file.
